Learning to read competes with face recognition ability…

suggests that the human ability to read actually cannibalizes parts of the brain used for other visual skills, such as tracking animalsâ€¦ and recognizing faces. Neurologists have long been faced with the â€œreading paradoxâ€ of how our brain contains such a specific area for reading while reading itself has only existed for 5000 yearsâ€“far too short a time for the reading area of the brain to be an adaptive trait.

[Our] visual plasticity may have allowed for humans to â€œrecycleâ€ visual portions of the brain for reading, but not, his new study suggests, without a cost…